Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Support Tom Tancredo's call to scrap the crescent memorial

The Park Service has a history of keeping the Secretary of the Interior in the dark about the decisions it makes in his name. It is likely that Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has never been told about the many warnings of Islamic symbolism in the planned Flight 93 Memorial. Please help bring Dirk into the loop by pasting the following letter (or one of your own) into an email for him.

Dear Secretary Kempthorne:

Please heed Congressman Tom Tancredo's call to completely scrap the present design for the Flight 93 Memorial. The original Crescent of Embrace design would have planted a bare naked crescent and star flag on the crash site:

The memorial plaza that sits roughly in the position of the star on an Islamic flag marks the crash site. (Click pics for larger images.)

All the redesign did was add some trees to the west of the original crescent:

Aside from the re-coloring of the site-plan image, the only actual change in the design is the additional arc of trees to the rear of a person facing into the original crescent.

The Park Service promised Congressman Tancredo in 2005 that Islamic iconography would be removed from the memorial. Instead, this iconography has only been very slightly disguised. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact in the redesign.

The giant crescent points to MeccaIn September 2005, a half dozen different bloggers verified that a person facing directly into the original Crescent of Embrace would be facing almost exactly at Mecca. That makes the crescent a mihrab, the central feature around which every mosque is built.

You can plant as many trees around a mosque as you want and it will still be a mosque. But this isn't just the world's largest mosque. The planned memorial is also full of terrorist memorializing features.

Please hear my voice along with those of Congressman Tancredo and Tom Burnett Sr., who is refusing to allow Tom Jr.'s name to be used in the crescent design. The memorial to Flight 93 should not be a terrorist memorial mosque.

About Me

Here is a short bio I sent to press people covering the Flight 93 memorial debacle. My training is as an economist. I was in the PhD program in economics at Stanford until my research led me more towards moral theory and constitutional law, at which point I dropped the program and started working on my own. I was writing a book on republicanism (the system of liberty under law) for World Ahead Publishing when I discovered that the Flight 93 memorial was going to be a terrorist memorial mosque. World Ahead agreed to first publish my book about this rehijacking of Flight 93 (Crescent of Betrayal, temporarily available for free download at CrescentOfBetrayal.com). This is not my first venture into journalism. Over the years I have been a writer, opinions editor, and advisor for Stanford’s conservative campus newspaper The Stanford Review, and am currently on the Review’s board of directors.